dir. Andrew Jarecki
Opens Fri June 20 at the Harvard Exit. It all started with a clown. Silly Billy, to be exact. New York's number-one party clown. Andrew Jarecki became interested in the whole party-clown culture after hiring Silly Billy for his child's birthday. He thought it would be a good subject for a short documentary. Having helped invent Moviefone in 1988, and having sold it several years ago to AOL Time Warner for close to a gazillion dollars, he had the means to make it.
Silly Billy is the clown name of David Friedman, by all accounts a brilliant self-promoter and well-respected entertainer. Kids love him because he's sarcastic and not averse to roughhousing. He acts in ways that adults usually don't. As Jarecki told me when he came through town recently, "When you first meet him, you just keep thinking, 'What makes this clown so angry?'" Following up on that question, Jarecki stumbled into a whole other movie.
As it turns out, David Friedman is one of three sons of entertainer-turned-beloved-schoolteacher Arnold Friedman. Everything changed for the Friedmans on Thanksgiving in 1987, when police arrested Arnold on child-pornography charges. Capturing the Friedmans begins by going through the evidence that led to his arrest, then follows the police as they start interviewing kids who took a computer tutorial with him and are horrified to start hearing accusations of rape, allegedly committed not just by Arnold but by his son Jesse.
Just when you're ready to dismiss this whole family as suburban monsters, Jarecki starts showing cracks in the case. Much of this doubt comes from the home-video footage David shot during the police persecution. The three sons are honestly amazed when the charges are first leveled, but believe they'll just blow over because they are innocent. They don't. Meanwhile, we see the family falling apart after Arnold's pedophilia is revealed.
Like a good detective story, this award-winning documentary contains no obvious twists and no easy truths. Just when you think you know the score, or when you think a travesty of justice is about to take place, another secret is revealed to make you question what came before. Truth is subjective, and ambiguity leads to better art and more interesting films. If there's a moral to the story, it's that secrets can destroy a family in unexpected ways, and that maybe, just maybe, that clown has a reason to be angry inside. ANDY SPLETZER
Le Cercle Rouge
dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
Opens Fri June 20 at the Varsity. The worst cliché in any heist movie is the criminal who wants to pull one last heist that's big enough to retire on. It's as though neither the screenwriters nor the movie producers can understand why anyone would engage in such a high-stress, high-risk activity. What French director Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur) understood better than most is that crime is not a hobby, it's a business. His characters are professionals, and they're good at what they do--which makes them even more fascinating to watch. This goes for the cops as well as the crooks.
In Le Circle Rouge, Alain Delon plays an inmate being released from prison after serving a five-year sentence. Before leaving, a guard tells him about a "job" mentioned by another prisoner. Meanwhile, a police captain (André Bourvil) is escorting a dangerous criminal (Gian Maria Volonté) back to Paris. Though the captain does everything right, the criminal manages to escape. Delon and Volonté end up teaming up for the job, which is an elaborate jewelry heist, while the captain uses his network of informers to track down the escaped prisoner.
Melville is so confident in his writing and directing that long stretches of the movie go by without the need for dialogue or music to explain what's going on or how you should feel. Not only is this a belief in his own ability to tell a compelling story visually, but a trust that the audience will follow. It pays off beautifully. Once it's over, you're left wondering how all those film-school auteurs with their suburban gangster stories managed to miss the Melville shelf at the video store. That may be the biggest crime of all. ANDY SPLETZER
Winged Migration
dir. Jacques Perrin
Opens Fri June 20 at the Egyptian. Following geese, cranes, swans, puffins, penguins, pelicans, and gulls, the makers of the insect documentary Microcosmos spent four years capturing impossible images of birds, via a bevy of methods and a gaggle of cinematographers, for Winged Migration, a documentary that is as much about the wonders of flight as the migration of birds.
A sparse voice-over and a few captions suggest the motivations and flight patterns of these creatures (the arctic tern's migration distance is a staggering 12,500 miles, for instance), but the drive of the story comes directly from the imagery. Never has flying been captured in such a breathtaking way. The camera often takes the point of view of a bird inside a flock as it swoops through Monument Valley, passes snowy mountains en route from India to the Far East steppes, flies under bridges in Paris, and glides over sand dunes in Africa.
A few other animals make cameos, including horses, seals, monkeys, and fish (who are swallowed whole a couple of times), but the one creature whose presence is most felt here is man. A bird struggles to free itself from an oil slick; a group of geese encounter a decoy before being blasted from the sky by shotgunning hunters. Still, birds have enemies within their own kind--an idea that appears first in an early shot of a baby bird inadvertently dropping unhatched eggs out of its nest as it struggles to take its first steps.
The textual information is cursory (no one is going to be able to write a zoology paper out of this), but the images speak even louder than the film's often cloying New Agey soundtrack. "For eighty million years, birds have ruled the skies, seas and earth," reads the opening title card. For 85 minutes, they rule this film. SHANNON GEE
